According to Mobile World Live, UK operator EE claims to be the first European operator to successfully aggregate 7 carriers of different frequency bands, exceeding 2.2Gbps in lab tests.
The experiment, conducted in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, employed five 4G bands and two 5G bands. The latter includes the 3.6GHz band, which was acquired in the country's latest auction in 2021.
Announcing the feat, EE noted that the technology would provide a "significant boost" in 5G network capacity, using a total of 170MHz of bandwidth in the test. Although the rate it records in the lab is 2.2Gbps, it expects this to drop to around 1.7Gbps in real-world scenarios.
The experiment used an analog terminal device equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 mobile platform and X65 5G modem and RF system.
EE expects to roll out 5G enhancements in some UK cities in 2022 and plans to sell compatible end-of-use devices.
The company is the first operator in the UK to launch 5G services and regularly makes statements about its advanced 5G network, including touting the speed at which it is deploying the technology across the country and the rate at which its network is achieving. (C114 Jiang Junmu)